Arts organizations are endangered
Last week, the president of the United States put himself in charge of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a cultural center he has never patronized.
When asked why he has never attended an event at this national treasure, he stated, “There was nothing I wanted to see.”
What Donald missed
During his first term in office, the Kennedy Center’s programming gravitated toward themes of identity, connection and transformation with musical theatre productions like “Hamilton,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” “The Color Purple” and “The Light in the Piazza.”
There were performances by Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, Mariinsky Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre.
The Center also hosted a festival of American orchestras, a festival to open the Kennedy Center’s building expansion, play festivals, book readings, author talks and numerous exhibitions of contemporary art.
Nothing to see there at all!
What artists can do
While I deeply appreciate the demonstrations and boycotts toward this administration, there is something unique that visual, performing and literary artists can do to voice their resistance: Send more creativity into the world.
Artists are a threat
Science, math, history and education are based on facts and are deniable by authoritarians and their gullibles. Artists, however, can reach into the same set of tools oppressors like to leverage: ideals, emotions, visuals and performance.
Autocrats don’t like that.
Artists can match their firepower
As we have seen, government can (and will) bully arts organizations and their funding sources into inertia and silence. It is not as easy, however, to muzzle the creativity and cleverness of individual artists.
Take notice
What if artists from across the USA produced small and medium acts of creative resistance on April 19…the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolutionary War?
Here once the embattled farmers stood
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And fired the shot heard round the world.
“The Concord Hymn,” 1837, Excerpt
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Pictured at top: Asger Jorn’s “Fear,” 1950, Oil on canvas, Photo credit: City of Grenoble/Grenoble-JL Lacroix Museum, On view at Musée de Grenoble
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